Innovation programs at NXP

How do we see Innovation in the first place? Innovation is creating successful new business by combining new technologies with market insights. At NXP we invest our R&D resources in developing great new technologies in a variety of competence areas.
By combining our technological expertise with market insights in innovation programs we create products providing better sensory experiences for end users. Let's take a closer look at some major innovation programs.

Software Defined Radio

Functionalities of mobile phones are evolving continuously, creating the requirement to support multiple communications standards (E.g. GSM, Edge, UMTS, HSDPA, LTE, Bluetooth, W-USB, FM, Wifi and NFC) on a single mobile phone. This convergence implies that each handset holds an increasing number of radio components which in turn creates serious issues with regards to size, number of antennas, coexistence and power consumption.

Software Defined Radios (SDRs) are expected to become the solution to this challenge by enabling the production of “reconfigurable” radios that can receive and transmit several different standards, thus making handset design more flexible and robust. Ultimately a Software Defined Radio will be able to support a new radio protocol just by running new software.

NXP already has a wide range of enabling technologies for SDR, including digitized RF-CMOS radios and leading edge A/D converters. We break down the RF portion of the design into different classes, based on data rates. In the middle-range is a reconfigurable RF channel for cellular communications. For high data rates a reconfigurable RF channel for high-bandwidth applications such as WiFi, WiMax and LTE is proposed. This approach requires the implementation of an highly parallel Embedded Vector Processor (EVP) to provide the computational resources for programmable modem functionality. EVPs complement classical DSP and ARM cores. This system will enable end-users to access a broad range of media, content and applications providing ultimate flexibility, reliability, and vibrant media experiences.

Service-Based Architectures

Today, electronic devices are growing in complexity as more functionalities are continuously being added. This calls for the ability to rapidly add functional blocks (or sub-systems) that are able to communicate and integrate with existing ones.

With this challenge in mind, we are working on a Service-Based Architecture concept, in an innovation program code-named AutoPanion aimed at creating electronic systems by just interconnecting “loosely coupled” subsystems communicating with one another. This is known as the “separation of concerns” architectural approach.

AutoPanion approach will make it possible for manufacturers to rapidly deliver multi-functional portable devices in a more cost-effective manner (i.e. making it easier, faster and cheaper to add additional functionalities like an MP3 player to a mobile phone). AutoPanion's modular approach relies on emerging industry standards from the MIPI (for hardware) and Khronos (for software) alliances in order to ease its adoption by OEMs. This will significantly improve time-to-market of products by enabling re-use of already validated subsystems.